In the spring of 2018, Yale University’s course registration system briefly crashed. The cause was not a technical glitch. It was approximately 1,200 undergraduate students attempting to enrol simultaneously in a single course — “Psychology and the Good Life,” taught by Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist who had spent her career studying decision-making and comparative psychology. The course, which drew on the science of happiness to teach students evidence-based strategies for living better, became the most popular course in Yale’s 317-year history in its first semester. Its waiting list exceeded its enrolment.
The question the Yale stampede raised — and that educators, policymakers, and university administrators have been grappling with ever since — is not whether students want this education. The demand is, by now, unmistakable. The question is what it actually looks like when a university decides to teach the science of happiness properly: what goes into the curriculum, how the course is structured, what pedagogical approaches the research supports, what the evidence shows about outcomes, and why most universities are still only beginning to answer these questions seriously.
This blog is the definitive answer.
Before examining how the science of happiness is taught in universities, it is worth pausing on why it presents a distinctive pedagogical challenge — one that is different, in important respects, from the challenge of teaching economics, or literature, or organic chemistry.
The difference is this: in most university subjects, the goal is understanding. The student of economics who understands the mechanism of comparative advantage has achieved what the course intended, whether or not they ever use the concept again. The student of literature who understands how narrative structure shapes meaning has received what the curriculum offered, regardless of whether they read more carefully in their daily life as a result. Knowledge is the product.
In the science of happiness, understanding is necessary but not sufficient. A student can understand, with perfect clarity, that gratitude practice produces measurable improvements in positive affect, prosocial behaviour, and sleep quality — and that understanding will produce no improvement in their wellbeing whatsoever unless they actually practise it. A student can understand the research on social connection and longevity in complete detail — and still neglect their closest relationships in the press of academic and professional demands. The science of happiness is a discipline in which the gap between knowing and doing is not merely possible but structurally predictable, and in which the primary pedagogical challenge is not knowledge transmission but behaviour change.
This is why the best happiness courses at universities are not primarily lecture courses. They are practice-based learning experiences — environments in which students engage directly with the practices the research supports, reflect on their own experience, and build the habits and capacities that the evidence identifies as foundational to flourishing. The lecture hall delivers the science. The practice delivers the transformation. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient alone.
Martin Seligman, who developed the PERMA framework at the Penn Positive Psychology Center, was explicit about this distinction in the design of positive education programmes: the goal is not students who know about wellbeing but students who have genuinely higher wellbeing. Assessment in happiness courses must therefore attend to both dimensions — to what students understand and to what they have actually experienced, attempted, and changed.
The most widely used structural framework for teaching the science of happiness in universities is Martin Seligman’s PERMA model — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement — which functions not merely as a description of wellbeing but as a curriculum map.
Each of the five dimensions represents both a domain of research and a domain of practice. Teaching Positive emotion means teaching students what positive emotions actually are (Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory), what produces them (gratitude, savouring, acts of kindness), and what undermines them (hedonic adaptation, the negativity bias, the misguided pursuit of circumstances rather than practices). Teaching Engagement means teaching students what flow is, how it differs from mere pleasure, what the conditions for its occurrence are, and how to structure their daily activities to maximise the proportion of time spent in genuine absorption. Teaching Relationships means teaching students the Harvard Adult Development Study’s central finding, the research on social belonging by Walton and Cohen, the specific communication practices that Gottman’s research identifies as building or destroying relational quality, and the skills — listening, repair, vulnerability — that the evidence most consistently associates with relationship depth.
Teaching Meaning means confronting students with the research on purpose and longevity (Hill and Turiano’s finding that purpose predicts mortality across a 14-year follow-up), Viktor Frankl’s observations from Auschwitz, Emily Esfahani Smith’s four pillars of meaning, and the specific practices — reflection, narrative, service — through which a sense of meaning is cultivated and maintained. Teaching Achievement means teaching students the difference between the achievement that is intrinsically motivating and the achievement that is driven by ego-protection — drawing on Dweck’s growth mindset research and Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory — and helping students identify the kind of genuine mastery experiences that build the self-efficacy that Bandura identified as one of the strongest predictors of sustained effort.
A well-designed happiness course covers all five dimensions, attends equally to the research and the practice in each, and creates the conditions for students to discover, in their own experience, which dimensions are most resourced and which are most depleted in their current lives. The PERMA model blog on this website explores the framework in depth and provides the conceptual foundation for understanding what each dimension involves.
The empirical literature on positive psychology education in universities — while still younger than the literature on positive psychology itself — has produced a set of findings that should shape how any institution designs a happiness course.
The first and most consistent finding is that practice matters more than knowledge. A 2018 meta-analysis by Hendriks and colleagues, reviewing 49 randomised studies of positive psychology interventions, found that intervention effects on wellbeing were significantly larger when the intervention involved active practice rather than passive learning. Students who were taught about gratitude in a lecture showed smaller wellbeing gains than students who were required to conduct a weekly gratitude practice. Students who learned about social connection in a seminar showed smaller wellbeing improvements than students who were required to perform acts of kindness and reflect on their experience. The knowledge activates understanding; the practice activates change.
The second finding concerns group context. Multiple studies comparing group-based and individual-based positive psychology interventions find larger effects in the group condition — even when the content delivered is identical. The reasons are well understood from the social psychology literature: groups provide accountability, shared motivation, and the normalising experience of discovering that other people are struggling with the same things. A student who believes they are uniquely unable to experience positive emotion, or uniquely deficient in meaningful relationships, is significantly less likely to invest in the practices that address these gaps than a student who has heard other students describe the same experience and discovered that it is common rather than exceptional. The science of happiness course that creates genuine community among its students is not merely a more enjoyable experience than one that does not — it is a more effective one.
The third finding concerns specificity of practice. Research by Lyubomirsky and colleagues on the conditions under which gratitude practice produces its effects found that variety and specificity matter: generic gratitude lists, written mechanically and repeatedly, lose their emotional potency through habituation. The practices that retain their power are those that require genuine attention to the specific features of specific experiences — what exactly happened, who was involved, what was genuinely valuable about it — rather than the routine production of conventionally acceptable grateful thoughts. This finding has direct pedagogical implications: happiness courses that require students to engage thoughtfully with specific practices, to reflect honestly on their experience, and to notice what actually works for them in their particular circumstances, produce better outcomes than courses that prescribe standardised routines and assess compliance.
The fourth finding concerns the role of cultural context. Research on the cross-cultural effectiveness of positive psychology interventions has found that practices derived from non-Western traditions — mindfulness from Buddhist and Indian contemplative traditions, loving-kindness meditation from the Brahmaviharas, the Confucian emphasis on relational virtue — often show equal or superior effects in non-Western cultural contexts compared to practices developed within the Western positive psychology research tradition. For Indian universities in particular, this finding supports the integration of Indian philosophical traditions — the Yoga Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishadic concept of Ananda — into the science of happiness curriculum not merely as cultural acknowledgement but as pedagogically effective content. Students who encounter happiness practices through frameworks that are already part of their cultural inheritance engage with them differently — and, the evidence suggests, more effectively — than students who encounter them as foreign imports. Our blog on what ancient Indian texts had figured out about positive psychology 3,000 years ago provides the substantive context for this integration.
What does a well-designed university happiness course actually look like? Drawing on the research and on the experience of institutions that have been teaching positive psychology at the university level for a decade or more, a number of structural features emerge as consistently associated with good outcomes.
Duration and credit status. The evidence consistently favours longer interventions over shorter ones: a semester-long course produces larger and more durable wellbeing effects than a weekend workshop or a single-term module. Credit-bearing status matters — not merely for institutional legitimacy but because it signals to students that the content deserves the same serious engagement they bring to their other academic subjects, and because it ensures that the course has the time and structure to move from conceptual introduction through genuine practice to reflective consolidation. The proliferation of brief, non-credit wellbeing “workshops” in university wellness centres — while better than nothing — consistently underperforms compared to credit-bearing academic courses in the research literature on outcomes.
Balance of lecture and practice. The most effective courses balance approximately equal time between the delivery of research content — the scientific evidence for each dimension of wellbeing and each practice — and structured engagement with the practices themselves. This is pedagogically unusual in university contexts, where lectures and seminars conventionally dominate, but it is what the evidence supports. The lecture without the practice produces informed students who are not more flourishing. The practice without the science produces behaviour without understanding, which is less likely to be sustained and adapted intelligently when circumstances change.
Reflective journalling and assessment. Research on the integration of reflective writing with positive psychology practice consistently finds that students who are required to write reflectively about their practice experience — what they noticed, what surprised them, what was difficult, what changed — show larger and more durable wellbeing gains than those who practise without reflection. This is not merely the effect of journalling on wellbeing (which is itself documented) but the effect of metacognitive engagement with practice: the student who observes their own relationship to a gratitude exercise, notices when it feels rote and when it feels genuine, and reflects on what made the difference, is developing the self-knowledge that allows them to use the practice intelligently across changing circumstances. Assessment in effective happiness courses attends to the quality of this reflective engagement rather than primarily to the recall of research findings.
Community and belonging. Given the evidence on group effects in positive psychology interventions, effective university happiness courses are designed to build genuine community among their students. This might involve structured sharing of practice experiences, peer accountability partnerships, group discussions that invite honest rather than performed responses about wellbeing, and activities that create the conditions for the kind of genuine mutual recognition — the experience of being genuinely seen and known by others — that the research on belonging identifies as independently protective of wellbeing. The course that produces a cohort of students who know each other’s names and something of each other’s inner lives is not merely a more pleasant experience than one that does not — it is delivering a wellbeing intervention in its structure, regardless of its content.
Integration of cultural traditions. For the reasons described above, effective university happiness courses do not teach positive psychology in cultural isolation. They situate the evidence-based practices within the philosophical traditions that give them depth and the cultural traditions that give them resonance — particularly in contexts where those traditions are part of students’ own inheritance.
One of the most practically challenging aspects of teaching the science of happiness in universities is the question of assessment. Universities are credential-issuing institutions — they assess, grade, and certify. But how do you assess wellbeing? And how do you prevent the assessment mechanism from undermining the very thing it is supposed to be measuring?
The concern is legitimate and has been noted by researchers and educators working in this space. Students who know they are being assessed on their happiness can be tempted to perform happiness — to report practices they have not actually conducted, to describe wellbeing improvements they have not actually experienced, to produce the responses they believe the instructor wants rather than the ones that honestly reflect their experience. Any assessment mechanism that rewards the appearance of flourishing rather than its substance is not merely ineffective but actively counterproductive.
The most thoughtful approaches to assessment in university happiness courses attend to several dimensions simultaneously. They assess demonstrated understanding of the research — which can be examined through conventional means without ethical complexity. They assess the quality of reflective engagement with practice — not whether the student felt better after their gratitude exercise, but whether they engaged with it honestly, noticed what they noticed, and thought carefully about their experience. They assess the development of the student’s own practice framework — the evidence that the student has begun to take ownership of their wellbeing as a domain of deliberate cultivation rather than passive experience. And they use validated pre- and post-course measures of wellbeing — the Satisfaction with Life Scale, PERMA-Profiler, or similar instruments — not as grades but as data that helps both the student and the course designers understand what is and is not working.
What effective assessment does not do is grade students on their levels of happiness. That would be both ethically problematic — students who have experienced genuine adversity during the course deserve their circumstances to be recognised, not penalised — and pedagogically counterproductive, since the goal of the course is not a particular emotional outcome but the development of the understanding and practices that support flourishing over time.
The landscape of university happiness education has shifted dramatically since Santos’s course made headlines in 2018. What was once a handful of pioneering programmes has become, in the intervening years, a genuine movement.
At Yale, Santos’s “Psychology and the Good Life” has been adapted for online delivery through Coursera, where it has attracted millions of enrolments globally — making it one of the most-enrolled online courses in history. The course’s success prompted Yale to make wellbeing education a more central feature of its undergraduate experience, with the development of additional courses and co-curricular programmes. The University of Pennsylvania, where Seligman founded the Penn Positive Psychology Center, has offered positive psychology courses since the field’s founding and has developed the most extensive postgraduate education in positive psychology available anywhere in the world, including a Master of Applied Positive Psychology programme.
In the United Kingdom, universities including Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE have incorporated wellbeing education in various forms, from standalone courses to modules embedded within existing programmes. The well-documented deterioration of student mental health in British universities — documented in NHS surveys that find one in six children aged five to sixteen meeting criteria for a probable mental health condition — has created significant institutional pressure to address the wellbeing dimension of university education more systematically. The gap between what is needed and what is currently provided remains large, but the direction of travel is clear.
In India, the landscape has its own specific features and its own specific urgency. The academic pressure experienced by Indian university students — the weight of competitive examinations, familial expectations, and the profound sense of identity fusion with academic outcomes that the examination culture produces — creates conditions of particular psychological vulnerability that well-resourced Western university environments only partially parallel. We write about the specific dimensions of the Indian student wellbeing crisis in our blog on what Indian students actually need from their universities, and about why the most important subject at university has been so systematically neglected in our blog on why the most important subject at university has no textbook yet.
The Rekhi Foundation for Happiness has been building and delivering the Science of Happiness Course across Indian universities for a decade, and the programme it has developed reflects the evidence on what effective happiness education requires.
Offered now at more than 90 institutions across six countries — including IIT Kharagpur, IIM Lucknow, Amity University, and 17 colleges of Delhi University, where it has evolved from an Add-on course to an officially recognised Value Added Course (VAC) — the course is one of the most extensive university-level happiness education programmes in the world. The scale is significant not merely as an institutional achievement but as a demonstration that happiness education can be delivered within the structures and constraints of existing university systems without sacrificing quality or depth.
The curriculum integrates the Indian philosophical tradition — the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Bhagavad Gita’s teaching on Nishkama Karma, the Upanishadic concept of Ananda, the Buddhist frameworks of sati and the Brahmaviharas — alongside the Western positive psychology research, not as separate modules but as genuinely integrated content in which the ancient and the modern illuminate each other. The course’s pedagogical approach reflects the research on what effective happiness education requires: it is practice-based as much as content-based, it creates community among its students, it attends explicitly to the cultural dimensions of wellbeing, and it uses assessment mechanisms designed to evaluate genuine engagement rather than the performance of happiness.
The Foundation’s MindLab technology — biofeedback devices that make the neurological correlates of stress, attention, and calm directly visible to students — brings the neuroscience of happiness into direct contact with students’ embodied experience, providing a dimension of learning that no lecture or reading can replicate. When a student can observe, in real time, what happens in their own physiology when they practise a mindfulness exercise or engage in a gratitude reflection, the knowledge ceases to be abstract and becomes undeniably, irreversibly personal.
The course’s evolution at Delhi University is particularly instructive. Its progress from an optional Add-on course to a fully recognised Value Added Course, supported by meetings with the Vice Chancellor and approximately 20 principals, represents the kind of institutional embedding that the research on positive education identifies as necessary for genuine, lasting impact. Happiness education offered on the margins of institutional life — as a wellness supplement available to students who self-select for it — reaches the students who are already most motivated to invest in their wellbeing. Happiness education embedded at the centre of institutional life — as a credit-bearing subject taught within the standard curriculum — reaches everyone, which is where the population-level impact begins.
The evidence on the outcomes of university happiness education has matured significantly over the past decade, and the picture it presents is consistent and encouraging.
Multiple studies of university-level positive psychology education programmes — including studies of the Penn MAPP programme, of Laurie Santos’s course at Yale, and of positive education programmes at secondary and tertiary institutions across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — have found significant improvements in life satisfaction, positive affect, and engagement following course completion. Studies using pre- and post-course measures with validated instruments find effect sizes in the small-to-medium range — meaningful improvements in a domain where change is notoriously difficult to produce through brief interventions, and substantially larger than the effects of most comparison conditions.
Critically, follow-up studies suggest that the improvements produced by well-designed courses are not merely transient. Research by Sergeant and Mongrain found that positive psychology exercises maintained their effects over a six-month follow-up period when they had been practised consistently during the course. Proyer and colleagues found sustained improvements in wellbeing twelve months after a positive psychology intervention when the intervention had included consistent practice rather than merely knowledge acquisition. The durability of effects is closely associated with the degree to which students have genuinely adopted the practices as ongoing habits rather than completing them as course requirements — which is precisely why the most effective courses attend carefully to habit formation, intrinsic motivation, and the development of what Dweck would call a growth orientation toward one’s own flourishing.
The outcomes research also reveals something that every university considering happiness education should take seriously: the students who benefit most from these courses are not the students who are already flourishing. Multiple studies find that students with lower baseline wellbeing — those who report higher depression, anxiety, and loneliness at the start of the course — show the largest wellbeing gains. This is encouraging from an equity perspective: it means that the course is not merely a way for already-well students to become incrementally better. It is a genuine intervention for the students who most need it, which is precisely the population that university wellness services, structured around self-referral and crisis support, systematically fail to reach.
The science of happiness is now sufficiently well-established, and the evidence on how to teach it effectively is now sufficiently clear, that the question facing universities is no longer whether this education is possible or valuable. It is whether institutions are willing to organise themselves around what the research shows students actually need rather than what the existing credential machinery is designed to produce.
The barriers are real. Curricular conservatism. Departmental territoriality. The difficulty of fitting practice-based learning into lecture-and-examination structures. The absence of faculty trained in both the scientific content and the pedagogical approaches that effective happiness education requires. The cultural assumption — still powerful in many institutional contexts — that wellbeing is a private matter and academic performance is the university’s proper concern.
But the barriers are not insurmountable. Yale’s course showed that students will show up — in extraordinary numbers, at an institution that offers them every other form of intellectual enrichment imaginable — when a university finally gives them what they most need. The Rekhi Foundation’s expansion to 90+ institutions across six countries shows that the model can scale within existing university structures without sacrificing the depth and integrity that make it genuinely effective.
What the science of happiness offers students is not a shortcut to feeling good. It is something considerably more valuable: the knowledge and the practices to build, deliberately and sustainably, the foundations of a genuinely flourishing life. That is the oldest purpose of a university education. It is, inexplicably, the one that most universities have taken the longest to take seriously.
The institutions that take it seriously now will, the research suggests, produce graduates who are not merely more employable but more fully human. That seems, in the end, like the more important achievement.
A science of happiness course at university is a credit-bearing academic subject that draws on the research fields of positive psychology, subjective wellbeing science, and contemplative neuroscience to teach students the evidence-based knowledge and practices most consistently associated with human flourishing. The most widely used curriculum framework is Martin Seligman's PERMA model — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement — which provides both a conceptual map of wellbeing's components and a curriculum architecture for covering each dimension in turn. In practice, an effective science of happiness course covers the science of positive emotions and how to cultivate them (including Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory and the research on gratitude and acts of kindness); the psychology of flow and optimal engagement (Csikszentmihalyi's research); the research on social connection and belonging (the Harvard Adult Development Study, Walton and Cohen's belonging science); the psychology of meaning and purpose (Frankl, Hill and Turiano); the science of motivation and achievement (Dweck's growth mindset, Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory); mindfulness and attention training (Kabat-Zinn, Davidson, Lazar); and self-compassion (Neff). Alongside the research content, effective courses require students to engage in structured practice — gratitude exercises, mindfulness training, acts of kindness, social connection challenges, reflective journalling — and to develop their own evidence-based approach to the cultivation of their wellbeing. The Rekhi Foundation's Science of Happiness Course, offered at 90+ institutions across six countries, additionally integrates the Indian philosophical tradition — Vedanta, the Yoga Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita — alongside the Western research, treating both as complementary methods of investigating the same territory.
The evidence shows that learning about happiness, in isolation from practising its prescriptions, does not reliably improve wellbeing. A student who completes a lecture series on positive psychology — who understands the research on gratitude, social connection, mindfulness, and meaning — but does not actually engage in the practices the research supports will show minimal wellbeing gains. This is why the research consistently finds that practice-based positive psychology courses produce significantly larger wellbeing improvements than knowledge-only approaches. The 2018 meta-analysis by Hendriks and colleagues, reviewing 49 randomised studies, found that active practice was the primary driver of intervention effects, with passive learning producing substantially smaller improvements. However, the research also shows that the combination of knowledge and practice is superior to practice alone — because understanding why a practice works, and under what conditions it is most effective, helps students engage with it more intelligently and sustain it more durably. Students who understand the neuroscience of attention are better equipped to practise mindfulness consistently and to troubleshoot their own practice when it becomes difficult. Students who understand the research on social connection are better equipped to invest deliberately in their relationships rather than allowing them to erode under academic pressure. The knowledge does not produce the improvement directly. It provides the conceptual framework within which practice makes sense, which is why the best university happiness courses treat them as inseparable. Pre- and post-course studies using validated wellbeing measures consistently find significant improvements following semester-long, practice-based university happiness courses — with effect sizes in the small-to-medium range and evidence of durability at six- and twelve-month follow-up.
The Rekhi Foundation's Science of Happiness Course differs from other university happiness programmes in three primary ways. First, in cultural integration: most Western university happiness courses teach positive psychology within the assumptions of a broadly Western philosophical framework, using the Indian and Buddhist traditions as occasional illustration. The Rekhi Foundation's course treats the Indian philosophical tradition — Vedanta, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Bhagavad Gita's teaching on Nishkama Karma and Svadharma, the Buddhist frameworks of sati and the Brahmaviharas — as a substantive intellectual contribution in its own right, equivalent in depth and rigour to the Western positive psychology research, and integrates both as genuinely complementary approaches to the same territory. This makes the course particularly resonant for Indian students, who encounter happiness science through frameworks that are already part of their cultural inheritance rather than through frameworks that must first be adopted from outside. Second, in scale and institutional embedding: with over 90 partner institutions across six countries, and a formal Value Added Course recognition at Delhi University that represents genuine institutional embedding rather than marginal provision, the course operates at a scale that most university happiness programmes have not approached. Third, in the use of MindLab technology: biofeedback devices that make the neurological correlates of stress, attention, and calm directly visible to students provide a dimension of embodied learning — the direct encounter with one's own physiological responses to contemplative practice — that lecture-and-seminar formats cannot replicate. The combination of scientific rigour, cultural depth, institutional scale, and technological integration makes the Rekhi Foundation's course a distinctive model whose elements are being watched by educators across India and internationally.
The barriers are structural, cultural, and practical, and each deserves honest acknowledgement. The structural barriers are significant: university curricula are governed by departmental structures, accreditation requirements, and credit allocation systems that make genuinely new types of course — particularly interdisciplinary courses that draw on psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and contemplative tradition simultaneously — difficult to introduce and sustain. A course that does not belong cleanly to a single department tends to have no natural institutional home, no dedicated faculty line, and no obvious place in the accreditation framework. The cultural barriers are equally real: the prevailing institutional assumption in most universities is that academic performance is the university's proper concern and wellbeing is a private matter that students manage for themselves, with support available at the counselling centre when private management fails. This assumption is empirically wrong — the evidence on the relationship between wellbeing and academic performance is clear in both directions — but it is deeply embedded in institutional culture and resistant to change on the basis of evidence alone. The practical barriers include the absence of faculty trained in both the scientific content and the pedagogical approaches that effective happiness education requires. Teaching a practice-based course that builds community, attends to cultural context, and assesses reflective engagement rather than knowledge recall is a different pedagogical task from teaching a standard academic lecture course, and it requires preparation and support that most university training programmes do not provide. The institutions that have successfully overcome these barriers — Yale, Penn, the Rekhi Foundation's partner network — have done so through committed institutional leadership, dedicated faculty development, and a willingness to treat the wellbeing of students as a genuine institutional priority rather than a supplementary concern. We write about this argument in depth in our blog on why the most important subject at university has no textbook yet.
Students evaluating a university happiness course should look for several features that the research consistently associates with genuine effectiveness. First, credit-bearing status: courses offered as part of the formal academic curriculum, carrying credit that counts toward a degree, tend to be more rigorously designed and more seriously engaged with than extracurricular or non-credit offerings. Second, practice-based structure: a course that requires students to actually engage in the practices the research supports — gratitude exercises, mindfulness training, acts of kindness, reflective journalling — rather than merely learning about them will produce substantially better outcomes. Third, community: courses that create genuine connection among students, that involve structured sharing of practice experiences, and that build the sense of belonging that is itself independently protective of wellbeing, are leveraging social context as a wellbeing intervention in their own right. Fourth, cultural integration: particularly for Indian students, courses that engage seriously with the Indian philosophical tradition alongside the Western research will tend to produce greater resonance and more durable engagement than courses that treat positive psychology as exclusively a Western contribution. For students whose universities do not currently offer a science of happiness course, several options exist. The Rekhi Foundation's Science of Happiness Course is actively expanding across Indian institutions — details about how to advocate for the course at your institution, or to access it directly, are available at rekhifoundation.com. Laurie Santos's "The Science of Well-Being" is available free on Coursera and provides an accessible introduction to the core content. And the research itself — Seligman's Flourish, Lyubomirsky's The How of Happiness, Waldinger and Schulz's The Good Life — is available to any student willing to engage with it seriously, with the understanding that reading about the science is the beginning of the work, not its completion.
The Rekhi Foundation for Happiness works with universities, institutions, and individuals worldwide to embed the science of happiness where it matters most — at the foundations of how people learn to live. Explore the Science of Happiness Course and our programmes at rekhifoundation.com.
Rekhi Foundation, founded in 2016, promotes Happiness Science via university centers, collaborating globally across six countries.
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